Devil's Mark. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ didn’t even have to look back. Another grenade-mounted assault rifle fell into his hands as if he was running a timing pattern. He put his front sight on the Landcruiser and squeezed the trigger. The Toyota went up like a torch as shrapnel tore open its gas tank and superheated gas and molten metal detonated it. The RAV4 next to it went up on two wheels from the blast. Bolan burned his mag into the windshield. The RAV wasn’t armored, and the bullets swarmed through the glass. The driver died and the RAV rolled ugly. Bolan tossed his exhausted weapon back.

      “Feed me!”

      The bucket brigade sent another grenaded weapon into the Executioner’s arms. He aimed and fired, and a Ford Bronco burst apart like a beer can full of firecrackers. He put thirty rounds into a Lincoln Navigator, but it came on with a total disregard for life and limb.

      “Feed me!”

      Bolan caught his next weapon and cracked the Navigator open like an egg. There were only two vehicles left, but they were uncomfortably close. A Porsche Cayenne wasn’t a typical suicide sled, but the Porsche came on with its gears grinding and its engine snarling like a panther. Bolan’s rifle brutally bucked against his shoulder as it slammed its two-pound payload airborne. The Porsche managed to crumple, expand and burst into flames all at the same time. Bolan dropped to a knee as flaming Porsche parts peppered the pueblo.

      “Feed m—” Bolan rose as an ancient Ford F-150 came on like the Devil himself was on its heels. “Smiley! J.W.! Hammer him!” The old Ford’s straight eight engine roared like a dinosaur, and it thundered in at ramming speed. Bolan emptied his clip into it.

      Rifle grenades thudded right and left. The Ford went sky-high. Bolan dropped prone. The low adobe wall cracked and spit orange dust as something very heavy with a lot of pepper behind it crashed against it. A smoking steel bumper scythed overhead and slammed into the pueblo. Bolan waited as bits of truck rained down and popped up as the last of the scrap metal clattered to the ground. “Feed me.”

      Bolan caught a rifle and gazed across the sea of burning hulks. Gravel crunched behind him as the rest of the team emerged. The box canyon was an automotive graveyard in which most of the occupants had unwillingly been cremated. Tortured metal popped and ticked. The F-150’s fiery demise had happened at nearly point-blank range, and it had liberally sprayed Wang’s BMW with burning gasoline and flying auto parts. The luxury sedan was just starting to burn in earnest. Only the RAV-4 wasn’t burning, but it lay on its back with a broken spine. The windshield was gone, and the two bullet-riddled passengers in front hung motionless and broken by their seatbelts.

      Fausto clapped Bolan on the shoulder and cackled happily. The ancient redoubt of his ancestors had survived another siege. “¡Bueno!”

      Wang stared inconsolably at his burning BMW. “Fuck.”

      Shell-shocked goats and chickens staggered about, making odd noises.

      Smiley and Villaluz fanned out on either side of Bolan, their rifles at the ready.

      Bolan eyes went beyond the smoldering SUVs and coolly observed the command vehicle. The Hummer H3T held position near the mouth of the canyon, its engine running, black paint gleaming. The tinted windshield stared at Bolan in opaque hostility. “What’s the max range on these bad boys, J.W.?”

      “Like I said, maximum effective range is seventy-five meters,” Wang said. “They’ll go a might farther but, it’s all Kentucky windage after that.”

      “Mmm.” Bolan nodded. He snapped up his weapon, took a moment to raise his sight about a foot over the top of the Hummer and fired. The 70 mm munition spiraled off across the canyon. It fell about fifteen meters short and another ten wide. Red desert dust vomited upward in a column as it detonated, and shrapnel sparkled off the Hummer’s sides. The staring match continued. The range was too long for rifle grenades, but for a rifle it was spitting distance. Bolan peered down his sights. “Let him have it.”

      The rifle rattled as the Executioner held down the trigger. Smiley, Wang and Villaluz added their weight of shot on full-auto, as well. Fausto’s big rifle boomed as he joined the fusillade. The Hummer suddenly looked as if it were in a wind-tunnel full of fireflies. Sparks streaked off the grille and hood and glass chips erupted in geysers from the windshield. But the Hummer just wasn’t affected by the Chinese assault rifle rounds. Fausto’s big bullets didn’t seem to bother it much either. The big, black 4x4 was armored up well beyond normal levels of executive protection.

      Everyone’s rifle racked open on empty nearly at the same time.

      Bolan slapped a fresh magazine into his weapon. The dark Hummer just sat there observing them with what seemed to be impassive evil.

      Smiley shook her head as she reloaded. “Whoever these guys are, they’re really starting to creep me out.”

      “Feed me,” Bolan said. Smiley went to the doorway and scooped one of the two remaining grenade-mounted weapons. Bolan nodded and took it. “Go check on Balthazar. Sit on him, and keep the last grenade for yourself. Nuke anything that gets past me.”

      “What are you going to do?”

      “I’m going for a walk to see if our friends out there talk, run or let me get close enough to blow them up.”

      Bolan nodded at Fausto. “Get back in your window. Cover the canyon mouth and keep an eye on the rims. J.W., Inspector, you’re with me, but fan out wide. If the doors on that truck open up and hardmen come out, I want them in a cross fire.”

      Bolan went for a walk.

      The rutted, pitted dirt path up to the pueblo was like the yellow brick road as it wove between the burning carcasses of cars that were sending the nasty black smoke of burning oil, upholstery and human flesh a hundred feet into the sky. Blackened bits of metal, glass and rubber littered the canyon floor. The sides of the canyon were littered with boulders and rock falls. Wang and the inspector moved swiftly from cover to cover. Bolan walked straight down the middle toward his impending appointment with his rifle at port arms. At ninety yards he began considering the shot. He could discern nothing through the tinted windshield, but he sure as hell felt himself being scrutinized and the scrutiny was decidedly unfriendly. At eighty yards Bolan’s finger slid onto his trigger. It didn’t matter if the man behind the glass was Satan’s favorite son and his pickup was armored up to endangered diplomat levels. No windshield was going to withstand two pounds of Chinese shaped charge warhead.

      And Bolan was getting tired of playing defense.

      At eighty-five yards all-terrain tires buzz-sawed into the dust in Reverse, and the Hummer suddenly shot backward the way it had come. Whoever was driving was good. He kept it in Reverse at an engine-burning twenty-five miles per hour and kept it on the path even as it bounced. Bolan watched as the Hummer disappeared in its own dust cloud. “Inspector?”

      “¿Sí?”

      “Let’s get license plates on any vehicle that’s still legible, then let’s take a look at the people in that flipped over RAV. Photos, fingerprints, anything we can work up real quick. J.W.? Fade back and spell Bree on Balthazar. Send her out. I want her agent’s eye and take on everything we find. Tell Fausto I want to move out of here in half an hour, and tell him I’m hoping he has a plan.”

      “You betcha.”

      Villaluz came out of cover and began snapping photos of the nearest hulk with his cell phone. Bolan did a lap around the Lincoln doing the same, but he suspected it wouldn’t do much good. He found blackened СКАЧАТЬ